For years, the Word Biblical Commentary has been one of our bestselling commentaries. This series emphasizes a thorough analysis of textual, linguistic, structural, and theological evidence. It contains contributions from some of the leading biblical scholars of our time.

The WBC has been available for Logos Bible Software for quite some time, but only as a CD-ROM. Now, with the download available, there’s no need to wait for a CD-ROM to ship, and you don’t need to go through the extra steps of getting Libronix resources to work in Logos 4. This means that if you plan to work on this Sunday’s sermon today, you can download the WBC now and begin using it right away. It’s fast, simple, and easy.

Having the WBC available for download is a milestone for Logos users, so we’re celebrating with a big sale. For a limited time, you can get the 59-volume Word Biblical Commentary for $499.95. That works out to only $8.47 per volume—a phenomenal deal! Remember, the sale price is good for only a few weeks, so you should place your order today to get the special price.

To get the sale price, enter coupon code WBCDOWNLOAD at checkout. You won’t see the sale price on the product website. The only way to get the sale price is to use coupon code.

These volumes are available individually for around $50 each. If you’ve had your eye on getting only a few of these volumes, it’s probably a better idea to spring for the whole set while it’s on sale.

Of course, if you still want to get the CD-ROM, that’s fine, too. The special sale price is good for both the CD-ROM and the download.

Today’s guest post is by Kyle Anderson, from the Logos Bible Software electronic text development team.

For many, the former University of Edinburgh professor Thomas Forsyth Torrance is best known as the person (alongside the late esteemed Geoffrey Bromiley) responsible for translating Karl Barth’s massive (over 10,000 pages) Church Dogmatics into English and introducing the English-speaking world to the towering theology of Karl Barth.

While we should applaud Torrance for this achievement, we should also keep in mind that he too was a top-notch theologian who spent most of his career working tirelessly for the benefit of the Church through his studies of Patristic theology, the person and work of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of the trinity, our knowledge of God, and reconciling theology and the natural sciences.

Torrance never wavered in his devotion to the Church. Born the oldest son of Chinese missionaries, Torrance began his career not as a professor, but as a parish pastor. This experience helped him develop a deep belief that would shape him the rest of his life: Christian thinking and action is for the glory of God and the benefit of the Church. One of the more famous stories of his life is the 81 year old Torrance traversing the mountains of the Wenchuan area of China carrying a money belt containing 11,200 yuan to help rebuild churches destroyed by the communist takeover in 1935. That’s quite an image for an elder theologian of Torrance’s caliber!

But what about his theology? Currently Logos carries four of his publications. Taken together they form a nice introduction his life’s work.

The first, The Christian Doctrine of God, uses Patristic theology to argue that within the life of God there is trinity in unity and unity in trinity. Or to put it another way: in God’s one being there are three persons—God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and those three persons are one being. For the Christian Church, the doctrine of the trinity isn’t some speculative mind exercise but leads us into a deeper place of worship. Further, he adds, understanding who God is in Himself is to know who God is for us. Because, as Torrance never tires of pointing out, there can be no separation between the being of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and how He has gone about saving us.

The second, Space, Time, and Incarnation, addresses two of Torrance’s specialties: Church history and the person of Jesus Christ. Space, Time, and Incarnation is unique in that rather than being a standard Christology volume, it looks at the spatial aspects of the incarnation. Namely, Torrance rejects the Greek philosophical tradition that thinks of space in terms of a container in favor of the early Church’s belief that in the incarnation Jesus Christ made space for himself. This view was made most visibly manifest in the Nicene term homoousious whereby Jesus is affirmed as one substance of God the Father and the term perichoresis in which there is a mutual indwelling between the person of the trinity. According to Torrance this has a profound impact on the way we speak of Jesus’ presence in our life and worship, even shaping the way we think scientifically about nature.

Lastly, Torrance is well-known for his work in combing the Christian faith with the work of the natural sciences. Our last two volumes: The Ground and Grammar of Theology and Divine and Contingent Order address these questions. In both volumes Torrance calls both the theologian and natural scientist alike to forgo the dualistic habits of mind that have dominated scientific thinking in a post-Copernicus landscape. Instead, both the theologian and the scientist have a scientific obligation to faithfully identify and describe phenomena as they are presented to us without rupturing the world into two realms—the spiritual and the phenomenal. Thus, rather than being competing worldviews both the theologian and the scientist are engaged in an enterprise of faithfully describing what God has presented to us. All persons are God’s priests of creation who are charged by God to identify, name and “to bring to expression the manifold realities of the created world around him . . . to bring the universe to view and understanding in its inherent harmonies and regularities and thus to allow the basic design, the meaning, of the universe to become disclosed.”

If you are in the market to grow your theology library, you really should look into Thomas Forsyth Torrance. You can also find three of Torrance’s works in the nine volume Science & Theology Collection!

We are sorry, the Mac Giveaway expired on Friday, October 1. Please watch for a posting of the winners on the giveaway page!

The official ship date of Logos 4 Mac is right around the corner! The completed version will be rolled out to new and existing users on Friday, October 1, 2010. Wow! That’s only a couple days away! The anticipation around Logos is palpable!

We just wanted to remind you that it is not too late for you to enter the Logos 4 Mac Ship Day Giveaway.

The Giveaway

We wanted everyone to share in our excitement for the Logos 4 Mac ship date. So, we decided to do our biggest giveaway ever. How big? We are giving away 105 valuable prizes to 105 different winners! The prizes include:

A 21.5″, 3.06GHz iMac worth $1,199.00

A 13″, 2.4GHz Macbook Pro worth $1,199.00

A 16GB Wi-Fi iPad worth $499.00

An 8GB iPod Touch worth $199.00

An 8GB Silver iPod Nano worth $149.00

Twenty $25 Apple Store gift cards

Thirty $15 iTunes gift cards

and fifty $10 Logos.com gift cards

How Do I Enter?

There are multiple ways to enter the giveaway, and you may do all of them. Several of the ways to enter can be done only once, but a few may be done multiple times! All the information you need to enter can be found at this link!

Don’t Forget About the Sale on Base Packages!

For a limited time, we are offering a special launch discount—20% off on all of our base packages and up to 20% off of upgrades. You don’t have to be a Mac user to take advantage of this deal!

So come one, come all. Take advantage of our deep discounts and huge number of giveaways to celebrate the launch of Logos 4 Mac.

You perhaps know that some events in the Bible are recorded more than one time. For example, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the account of Jesus being tempted by Satan. The passages describing the same event in the Bible are called parallel passages.

In addition, a book displaying these parallel passages is called a harmony. A harmony of the gospels, for instance, usually shows, in column format, parallel passages from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. With a harmony you can easily read how various biblical writers described the same event.

Did you know that your library likely contains numerous harmonies? The Parallel Passages section of the Passage Guide automatically searches these harmonies for you, but you can also open them individually from the Library:

Click the Library icon

In the Find box of the Library enter this text: type:harmony

You should now see all of your harmonies listed

Click a specific title to open it, such as, A Harmony of the Gospels by A.T. Robertson
Note: A Harmony of the Gospels, by A .T. Robertson is included in base packages from Bible Study Library and above.

Click the panel menu on this resource and select Show table of contents

From the contents pane click a section title like 25. The Three Temptations of Jesus

Now by reading three different accounts of the same event, we may be able to glean details perhaps we overlooked before!

The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary and the Anchor Yale Bible have been available from Logos for a few years. Now we’re getting ready to release the remaining books in the Anchor Yale Bible Group—the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library.

There are lots of great reasons to pre-order the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library.

It aims to present the best contemporary scholarship in a way that is accessible not only to scholars but also to the educated non-specialist.

It is committed to the work of sound philological and historical scholarship, supplemented by insight from modern methods, such as sociological and literary criticism.

The list price for these books comes to a total of $1,290.50. Even if you were to search the web, find the best deals, scour your local used bookstore, and get every volume on sale, you would still pay more than $800.00 for this set.

For a limited time, you can still get the 29-volume Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library from Logos for $599.95, which works out to around $20 per volume. It’s the best deal you’ll find anywhere, and the best reason to pre-order the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. It’s an even better value when you think of how much more useful these volumes will be once you have them in Logos.

This Pre-Pub price ends on October 5, so you need to pre-order today to get in on this deal. When the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library ships, the price will jump, so make sure you place your order today before it’s too late. Get it now!

Before Logos Bible Software, when I was studying a topic, I would first determine which types of books I wanted to look at (theology, commentary, devotional, etc.). Then I would go to that shelf and one-by-one check the scripture indexes (if they had one) and one-by-one I’d accumulate a stack of books that would need to be copied from, and eventually re-shelved. But with Logos all I have to do is “type a passage and click go,” and I can find out that in my library there are thousands upon thousands of hits on my search. While it would be fun (for me) to read through them all, none of us has that kind of time. What I needed in Logos was a way to separate my thousands of books into “shelves” so I can search just a few types of books. Fortunately, Logos has made that feature available with collections.

Collections are just like those shelves in my office, only better, because properly constructed, they will fill themselves with the right books.

I recently attended a Morris Proctor Seminar and, while I was familiar enough with the program as a forum MVP, for some reason I continued to be baffled by collections. Morris ably demonstrated in an easy to follow manner the power and potential of easy to build collections.
First the HOW:

To create a new collection click tools>collections and then make sure you’re working on a new collection (screenshot). In Logos 4 we can build collections based upon fields used in the Library such as “title, author, subject” (for a complete list consult the Logos Wiki on Collections.)

First, let’s call this collection “Systematic Theologies.” Then using the title field I can restrict my collection to only those books which contain keywords likely to be in the title of Theology books. In the “start with resources matching” line type the following (or cut and paste) title:(theology,dogmatics,fundamentals,doctrine). This will gives us any books in our Library which contain any of those four keywords. That results in quite a list, but if you own and want to keep the Journal of Evangelical Theology out of your collection, add the ANDNOT boolean operator and the type field to actually remove extra books from your collection title:(theology,dogmatics,fundamentals,doctrine) ANDNOT type:journal, title:”evangelical review”.

Any other extra books you may not want in your collection, such as Toward a Theology of Theological Education you can drag and drop into the “Minus these resources” area.

Now when I’m doing a study on Luke 3:2 and the concurrently listed high priesthood of both Annas and Caiaphas, but I want to specifically see what just my theology books have to say about this, I can open a search panel and set it to search only my Systematic Theology Collection (screenshot). Now I get only 11 articles I need to investigate instead of 991. That’s a powerful trade-off.

Take the time to learn collections, and you can amp up your study with focused searching in dynamic collections. Oh, and the dynamic part? Just purchase another theology book like Robert Culver’s Systematic Theology and it is automatically included in your next focused search.

Today’s guest post is by Bryan Smith, from the Logos Bible Software Web Development team, and development lead on Biblia.com.

Way back in February of 2008, we announcedRefTagger, our free tool for transforming Bible references on the web. If you run a site that contains Bible references, you can add RefTagger’s JavaScript snippet in just a few minutes. RefTagger will instantly convert references on your site into links to the full text of the passage. Hovering over a reference link will display a small tooltip with up to 280 characters of the passage, so readers don’t even need to leave your site. In the 2 ½ years since its launch, RefTagger has linked 5 billion Bible references, helping millions of people to dive deeper into their studies. See just a few of the sites currently using RefTagger.

If you, like myself, have been loving the New International Commentary but have asked yourself “Where are the original NICNT volumes?” I’ve got some great news for you! These long-awaited volumes, containing critical works from a multitude of noted theologians and biblical scholars, are now available on Pre-Pub at Logos.

Published by Eerdmans, these ten original commentaries are timeless, holding the writings of Norval Geldenhuys, Merrill C. Tenney, John Murray, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, and others . For decades, the writings of these gifted theologians have influenced those in the academic arena, behind the pulpit, and in homes around the world with their superior biblical scholarship and stirring content. Each volume of the New International Commentary series is brimming with scriptural insight, making these resources essential tools for all hoping to dive into serious Bible study.

But those aren’t the only reasons to get excited about these newly offered commentaries—here are a few more:

These original NICNT volumes are landmark commentaries, highly significant at the time of their release and still considered to be pillars of New Testament study.

With a Basic Search in Logos 4 you can locate every occurrence of words, phrases, or biblical references scattered throughout your entire library. After getting your search results, though, you may see a long list of books that can be intimidating. Here’s a small suggestion to help manage the hits:

Execute a Basic Search

When the results appear click By Book (top-right of results section) so that the resources titles are showing

Right click on the title of any resource and select Collapse all

Now you can easily see and scroll through the resources containing results.Click the “little triangle icon” next to a resource title to expand the hits in just that book!

Just in case you were wondering, Greek is different from English. But it’s not just the words that differ, there are also different preferences about how to get certain jobs done. These differences often result in a mismatch, where English won’t allow you to do something with a participle that would be perfectly natural in Greek. No worries, it just means that we need to find some means of mapping the information across other than a literal translation. This is where the Lexham High Definition New Testament (HDNT) and Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament (LDGNT) come in. These resources utilize a custom markup scheme to help you understand what each part of the verse is doing, regardless of how it is translated. Let’s take a look at one of my favorite things: participles! These are the verbs in English that mostly end in –ing, like hiking, biking and eating. Basically, participles let you talk about an action as though it were a thing. Because of the mismatch is usage between Greek and English, Greek participles often get translated as though they were a main action. It doesn’t sound like a big deal until you understand what their main purposes are. The participles the precede the main action de-emphasize or background the action compared to the main action. This allowed the biblical writers to keep the spotlight on the main action while still mentioning other things that happened. If you lose the participle, then you lose the focus of the writer’s spotlight (see an earlier post on this topic here).

The HDNTand LDGNTuse grayscale to make sure that the backgrounded actions can be clearly seen. This graphic representation let’s you see at a glance what each part of the discourse is doing, regardless of how it is translated. Take a look at Ephesians 2:1-5 to see what I mean about Greek allowing things that just would not be acceptable in English.

Paul has only one big idea in this whole section: God making us alive with Christ. All of the rest is set-up so that we understand all that was going on when he did this. We were dead in our sins, but God was rich in His mercy even though we were walking in disobedience. This is very important information, or Paul would not have included it. But in the big scheme of things, it is intended to set the stage for his one main thought. To try and keep all of the Greek complexity in a readable English translation is just not possible. But having all of the background information translated as though it was the main action can distract us from clearly seeing where Paul’s spotlight is focused, making us lose focus on the big idea.

The HDNT and the LDGNT help bridge the divide, making sure your focus stays sharp. They do this not just with the graphics, but also with the block outline. This simple outline enables you to clearly see the flow of the text while still reading it in its original order, unlike traditional diagrams. The participles that precede the main action are labeled Circumstance in the left column, whereas the ones the follow the main action are labeled Elaboration. These other participles spell out what the main action looks like in practice. In v. 3, living in the passions of our flesh is elaborated upon as carrying out the desires of the body.

The goal of the HDNT is to help those who aren’t comfortable working in Greek to identify significant discourse devices are used by the writers and to understand their significance. For those who want more detail, the LDGNT provides much more, including analysis of word order to help you better understand the structuring of passages and much more.

The LDGNT comes with all of the HDNT resources bundled in the same package.

For those interested in learning more about participles, especially how the uses I describe mesh with more traditional approaches to grammar, check out the Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament book or teaching videos. There is a whole chapter devoted to the topic, beginning with how grammarians like Wallace, Robertson, BDF and others have treated the issue.

If you want to skip the detail and jump right to the exegetical conclusions, take a look at the High Definition Commentaries. The Philippians volume is in process, to be followed by Romans. This isn’t your standard commentary, as it focuses exclusively on talking you through the flow of the text, providing custom graphics to help you communicate your message in a sermon or Bible study.